Why does the 600i have mostly size M components, the same size as the Freelancer or Constellation, but have a ship size like a Starfarer or Caterpillar with large components? Will the 600i be a weak ship?
TL;DRThe 600i is not considered weak, since medium components suit its role and a large power plant covers its needs, and the designers say stats alone are hard to judge until Item System 2.0 is fully in.
I don't think so. It's got them because it doesn't need to have the components of the larger ships, which have got extra roles and functionality that require those things. It's got a large power plant because it's got a lot of things to do, but the rest of the components that are medium are sort of capable for what its intended role is. It's not out there refining fuel like the Starfarer. It's not a supremely large target that needs to have all its power putting into shields. It sort of fits in with those other medium sized ships.
It's one of those hard things to really wrap your brain around from an outside design perspective until the full Item System 2.0 and component system fully come online. Until players are able to actually pull components out and swap them, increase the grade, change the class, whether it's civilian or military or industrial and whatnot. Until we actually start to get our hands on these components and start swapping them out and seeing the effect of each one on ships, this is a question that comes up quite a lot, is what I'm saying. It's going to be a hard thing for folks like me outside of design to really wrap our heads around until that day comes.
It's very hard to just see it from those stats and get sort of how it works together. You just see the numbers and the quantities and you have to put it together in your mind as to how it works, but there's a lot more that goes on in the middle. The exact same configuration in two ships could completely be different gameplay-wise.
And the easy thing to forget is also, just using the power plant for instance, it's not just the size of the power plant, but it is the consumption of the ship, how the ship itself is designed to consume power. So if the ship is a more efficient design, for instance, where it uses primarily ballistics instead of energy weapons, it's not going to need that big a drain on the power plant like another ship might.
Yeah, and there's other components in ships that aren't on the website, and they aren't swappable, so you don't see any interaction with them. Like heat sinks on ships, you can't swap them out, they're just part of the ship. So you could put a million coolers on a ship, but if that heat sink is quite tiny, it's not gonna do a great deal.